Guide

Cornucopia’s online guide

TURKEY

Our Destinations pages show the great diversity of the country and its neighbours. Divided by area, they cover the main cities and sights, museums and galleries and suggest hotels and restaurants. In the footsteps of Cornucopia’s intrepid correspondents, they also discover wilderness, curiosities and half-forgotten ruins. Readers are invited to send their own suggestions to feedback@cornucopia.net.

Istanbul is Turkey’s most populous city, and its cultural and financial centre. Located on both shores of the Bosphorus, the narrow strait between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, it bridges Asia and Europe physically and culturally.

Turkey-in-Europe is the size of a small country, but a fraction of its former Balkan self. Unmissable are Sinan’s Edirne gem, a pilgrimage to Gallipoli, the long drive through the sunflower fields, wonderful fish and New Zealand-quality wines.

Take a drive around the Sea of Marmara. From European Thrace across the Dardanelles Strait (ancient Hellespont) to the former Ottoman capital of Bursa and the ceramic town of Iznik, this was the Ottoman heartland.

Turkey’s Aegean coast takes on many guises as you head south from the cool waters of the Dardanelles, across the Troad peninsula to classical Ephesus and Labraunda, with Bodrum – ancient Halicarnassus – as your final port of call.

We divide the Mediterranean coast, littered with archaeological sights, into two halves: to the west the Taurus mountains dramatise the Turquoise coast. To the east the plains stretch towards less visited Tarsus and Antakya.

Turkey’s heartland is home to some of the world’s earliest civilisations – the Hittites, King Midas, the Seljuks of Konya… Fairytale Cappadocia is here too, as well as Roman Angora, the modern capital of Ankara.

'The Wild East’ is how it was described in the special 30-page feature in Cornucopia 24, with photographs by Manuel Çitak. The feature was by Min Hogg, who returned for Cornucopia 44 to write about these epic borderlands. In Cornucopia 54 photographer Brian Mckee visits Lake Van and the far east of Turkey in a special report.